The Anecdotal Life of Gus Hawthing
by bisexualcharliedavis
Summary: What drives good men to do bad things? (minor Bill/Gus)


_A/N: found some inspiration finally! Pumped to have written over 3000 words in a couple of days. Warnings: suicide of a main character, character death, canonical murder. Trying a new style. Leave a review if you liked it!_

If you ever asked him, then Gus Hawthing would tell you that all things considered, his childhood was not as bad as it could have been. Which is true, things can, dear reader, almost always get worse. However it also goes without saying that the childhood of such a man must inevitably play a part in his destruction. Not that anyone would ever ask or care about such minor details in a minor life such as his, as is the usual fate of those secondary to the larger voices in the world. Indeed, up until the time he took the life of one Hazel Mahoney, Gus Hawthing was little more than anecdotal in the lives of those around him. But as with most stories, it doesn't start there.

He had a mother, and a father as every man woman and child do. By that I of course there were two people who opted to procreate and the child that they made together they named Gus. Gus himself remembers by and large most details about his parents but for the sake of brevity, few will be shared here. He had a mother. She was tall, with long blonde hair that he supposed would fit the definition of silk. He had a father, who had large calloused hands from hours of hard work. His father liked few things in his life. He liked to drink, and Gus knows exactly what it is he likes to drink. Whiskey. Single Malt. No ice. He'd made his father drinks from the time his hands were large enough and strong enough to hold the bottle. He liked to gamble with his mates. He liked to drive his car above the speed limit. Gus is acutely aware that neither he nor his mother made that list.

Gus's mother liked to shop, which was difficult on the meager money their father left them to live on monthly. She liked to smoke, camels, uncorked. She liked, more than anything else, to bet on the greyhounds. Gus is acutely aware that neither he nor his father made that list.

As a child, Gus liked his mother, and his father. He also liked to help cut up meat in the kitchen, and to dissect the dead birds he found in their backyard.

This sort of life and these sorts of interest leads to an odd little boy, and as most of us who have experienced the cruel politics of school are aware, being odd is a shameful and scary experience. Of course it is being odd like Gus Hawthing with his calculating nature and inability to socialize with his peers, combined with an unfortunate home life filled with addiction that led to him his position at the bottom of the pecking order. Even bullied students tend to be acknowledged by their peers. Gus's peers all seemed to have collectively decided that he was not even worth expending the energy to insult. But he got good grades, and his report cards were all filled with As so no teacher, adult guidance consular or other adult ever sought him out to question him about his feelings on school.

When Gus Hawthing was twelve, everything stopped being quite so normal. His father was drinking more than he was working, and his mother was gambling away their savings. Of course, he put his head down and studied hard, and tried not to raise their ire. It was what he did best, afterall. He became so quiet that he became all but invisible. His mother died one night on her way back from the track. When they needed someone to identify the body, Gus's father was unconscious so off he went, on his bike, to the morgue to look at her. Indeed, she was dead. Lifeless and limp and still. The pathologist is a young man with black hair and large green eyes who pats his shoulder and assures him it will be okay. Gus is certain that he is right. He decided on medicine right in that moment. It seemed like a natural choice for someone like him. He wanted to ask if he could be allowed to stay and watch the autopsy, but he chickened out at the last second, because after all, he was only twelve and he was certain a grow up would not want a child hanging around. Of course this was the time that Gus missed out on the opportunity to get a mentor from himself. A rare positive influence in his otherwise grim life. Had he asked, and had gotten himself a mentor, perhaps his future may not have transpired the way it did but alas, we must live with the choices we make, and we can never know what the other outcomes might have been. So off young Gus went, feeling inspired and determined to learn all about working with the dead. His dead mother was little more then forgotten to him now she was gone. After all, they were not close. She was little more then a distant figure head of what might have been. And perhaps that was a cruel way to think of your own mother, but Gus was not a person with a well developed sense of empathy, so he didn't know that.

As he grew older, Gus devoted himself to working hard. He studied his best, and aced his exams. He earned himself a place at a prestigious medical school (thanks to a scholarship). His father doesn't even notice his suddenly spotty attendance at their family home, but that's fine because he will notice when Gus comes home and hangs his diploma, of that Gus is sure. Which was likely an incorrect assumption as im sure you may know, reader. It is likely that Gus would have been equally as ignored if he was Gus Hawthing With A Medical Degree And that would have been true, except he doesn't live long enough to see that. He dies when Gus is in his third year of medicine. He takes up smoking the same day he donates his father's body for the first years to cut upon.

From his whole childhood, a single thing remains stuck in his mind. A comment from his father when he was sixteen and scrubbing vomit out of the carpet. 'This is your future, Gus. You were born fucked. Should've given you up." A threat that ran through his whole teenage years, actually. Not that it would ever come to fruition. He'd been mostly alone since twelve. He'd be just fine here or there. But he supposed he should be grateful that his father never gave him up. Which is something he never understood. He might have turned out better if he'd been given up. Might have gotten another set of parents who knew how to raise a boy like Gus. But alas, he had what he had and he did what society said he had to. It was just easier.

Getting his degree is… Not an event worth remembering. Because our lovely protagonist doesn't quite remember it either. He has a fancy certificate. He has his future job in Ballarat. He drinks until he can't remember and the next morning's throbbing headache tells him that he kept drinking after that as well. The following morning he has something of an epiphany, finally. He doesn't have to be his parents. He's more than that. He just finished university for God's sakes. While he brushed the taste of sickness out of his mouth and looked at himself in the mirror he swore on his life that he'd never end up like that.

All things considered, comparatively, Gus Hawthing will tell you that he had a childhood that was not as bad as it probably could have been. It could have been worse and that is the one thing he has always told himself. In a court, it might be used by a lawyer to show that Gus didn't deserve to suffer for any longer then the already had and that they should consider parole at some point. But really, all of that was for moot because as it stood, Gus would have nothing to go back to.

Ballarat was a town full of murder. More murder then Gus had ever seen in his life. Thomas Blake told him one got used to it, and that Gus would last longer if he didn't question it. And he supposed that was a fairly normal request, even if there was an above normal amount of murders in this town. Thomas however, does not appreciate any wit he may add to the conversation. He was a solitary sort of man with a holier then you attitude who was, more than not, interested in going home and being sad about his dead wife. A thing Gus, try as he might, could never understand. He spent his days surrounded by the dead. His own parents were dead. But he still didn't understand the attachment of it. Of course, he'd mourned the relationships he didn't have with his parents, but he didn't understand what he'd truly lost. And perhaps that played a part in his inevitable choices that led to his (sadly) inevitable destruction.

The combined factors of being new to town, not so beautiful, working with corpses and a fairly unlikeable personality led our unfortunate protagonist to a fairly lonely existence. He worked, but dead people rarely talk back (and when they do it usually mean they're in the wrong place. Or that they'd been misdiagnosed, which led to a lot of paperwork.) But in the same way that he'd made his way through his childhood, and his adolescence, and his university years, Gus Hawthing kept on keeping on. And it was such keeping on that led him to meet Bill Hobart for the first time.

It's not glamourous. He's elbow deep in a woman (who isn't really worth remembering but for the sake of this story I will inform you that she died from heart failure and that he was checking to see if her latest surgery had been performed to the best of the surgeon's ability. It was) and Bill Hobart storms in like a man possessed. He wants a report for Lawson, but Gus doesn't have it yet because Thomas is away on vacation (to Melbourne. For a conference or something. Gus doesn't know, he wasn't paying attention) and he hasn't had time to do anything in the otherwise overcrowded room. Bill seems slightly taken aback by Gus's hands on the rib spreaders. That's not an unusual reaction. Gus is a rather unassuming man, and not one who is typically considered dangerous or worthy of any consideration. Bill Hobart is the opposite of that. He's considered very dangerous, and Gus likes that. Maybe more then he should.

The first person who ever really engaged Gus outside of work was Bill Hobart. Unexpected, perhaps, but Gus didn't much care because he was (as much as he loathed to admit it) quite lonely. Bill first suggested they should go out that evening (just the two of them, not with the boys. Probably because he knows Gus would have turned that down) for a drink. Gus agrees, because he believes he can handle a drink and Bill Hobart has the sort of humor he can appreciate so he goes along with it.

As it turns out, they get along quite well. Bill is sarcastic, and even more so when drunk. Gus has a rather dry sense of humor and appreciate the dark undertones to his joke, as distasteful as some may be.

As fate, would have it, the person who gave Gus his first taste of Morphine was Thomas Blake. While the circumstances regarding the situation are not strictly ones that bare remembering (let us say that they involve a case, the local mob and four bullets) it should be known that the initial dosage and feeling were enough to awaken his otherwise dormant addiction gene.

It's easy enough to hide. No one is really looking for him enough to bother to tell that he had a problem. No one questions how much morphine he has issued in his name. Why would they? He was Gus Hawthing; pathologist. Unassuming. Quiet. Mostly kept to himself. And even if they did notice, who was there to care? No one. Yes, reader, poor Gus had no one in his life to notice his addiction, and frankly, I think he liked it better that way.

Of course, Bill Hobart had to come and fuck all of that up for him, didn't he? Yes, Gus's rather unlikely friendship with Bill Hobart grew steadily over time. Bill was funny, and interested (and handsome but that wasn't important) More then all of that, he was just there. Gus had never had many mates in his life, but he was positive that Bill was one of them.

"Do you believe in love, Gus?" they are sitting on Bill's couch, they have long since stopped meeting at the pub. Bill's house was the more likely place to be. A small townhouse with one bedroom. Better then Gus's studio for miles. Gus does not have a lot of experience with love. Remember that.  
"I don't know. Why?" Perhaps is Gus had a better understanding of empathy. Perhaps if he wasn't so invested in his own downward spiral, Gus might have been able to pick up on what Bill was laying out so plainly in front of him. But he doesn't. So, it passes him by. Redemption was so close, but it too passed him by. A trend that, had Gus not killed Hazel Mahoney, would probably have continued until he accidentally killed himself with a morphine overdose.

"No reason. I was just. I was just wondering." Bill is not acting himself. Gus, as far as he had been aware, had been a pretty good friend. He always came over and never said no. He did the things friends are meant to do. He even listened to cricket on the radio. Though we might realize what was happening, Gus did not. It was that night that he decided that his time in Ballarat must end. Even the people he had thought liked him didn't like him anymore. People's tolerance of him had a time limit. This is not so, and while the average person might have found Gus annoying, or intolerable, Bill Hobart was not an average person. In fact, I would venture as far to say that he was highly abnormal if Gus's life 'till this point has been anything to go by. Bill Hobart thought that Gus was an interesting person. A funny person. A person who he could see himself living with. For the things that most people saw as odd, Bill found endearing. The things we would chastise him for, Bill found familiar. In theory, they would have worked well together

Gus accepted a job in Melbourne later that week. It takes three days after that for Hazel Mahoney to come and discover his filthy little habit. It's probably better (for Gus at least) that she was the one to find it out. It might have been better if it was Bill, because Bill was his friends, but Hazel Mahoney once again held redemption out to him. Put it on a silver platter. Told him she wouldn't even tell the board if he got clean. And what did Gus Hawthing, our protagonist, do in return to such an offer? He turned up his nose. Which really, all things taken into consideration, is not an unexpected response. When someone is addicted to something, that something takes over their life. Now, he no longer has to worry about his friendship with Bill, so he can take more morphine than ever before. And how would he get morphine? His work. And who was threatening to take away that work? Hazel Mahoney.

He expects to feel something when he kills her. Sorrow, perhaps? They hadn't been friends, but certainly they'd known one another. Relief? Hm. Slightly. Joy? No. He certainly doesn't feel that. (not that he would have anything to compare it to) instead, he feels nothing. Not even the tiniest peak of emotion. He wonders where it all went. He strings her up and burned his arm with the rope and that's the first thing he's felt all night. He thinks about the morphine he will have when he goes back to his home. It's enough to make him smile.

Getting caught, to us, may seem inevitable. After all, Lucien Blake is a semi omniscient being who always gets the right guy. Gus didn't see it that way. Lucien Blake was standing on a pile of stones and some day he would fall and he would fall hard. After the fool of himself he made at the board meeting, Gus had been sure that it would have been then. Apparently, it wasn't. Deep down, he knew he was just stalling. He'd been found out. There was nothing for him after this. He doesn't put up a fight after he gets taken by the young Parks constable.

He confessed everything in the interrogation following, not that he really had to. He spoke to Bill the whole time. After being escorted to the cells, Matthew Lawson looks at him with that cold hard gaze and he saw what the rest of the world saw. A horrible little man. A disgusting son of a Bitch. A mistake. He sets the keys on a nearby chair.  
"Don't kill him, Bill."  
He leaves. Some might say that Gus Hawthing, our intrepid protagonist (or rather, Anti Hero, at this point) deserves what happened next.

Bill Hobart was rather passionate about this particular beating. Gus does him what some might say a favor and does not mention the tears that are on Bill's face that make their way onto his. When he's done, he spits on Gus's face, and stalks out. It's then and there that he realizes what Bill had been trying to tell him that night. He doesn't have it left in him to even bother getting up off the floor. Not yet. No, he lay there for longer then he cared to consider, eyes firmly on the wall. Homicide was coming for him tomorrow to take him for his court date. So he had until then to come up with a solution.

Perhaps, if Gus was another man then that would have not have been the second last time he ever saw Bill Hobart. If Gus was another man, then he might have gotten on the bus the next day for Melbourne. He might have met Bill at the station. They might have ended up some other way. But they didn't. It ended like this because, this, dear reader is where we meet Gus Hawthing for the last time.

Gus's thought process, I presume, went a little something like this. He could go to jail forever, never work again. He could try for parole and come out to a world that he didn't know or understand, with no one waiting for him. He could do either of those things. Or he could allow Hazel Mahoney to get her own back.

There is one sheet on the bed, and a window with bars. I'm sure, readers many, that I do not need to explain to you what Gus was going to do with that bedsheet. Killing Hazel Mahoney gave him the skills he needed to tie a noose. There's no stool, but the bed moves. If he wasn't intent on killing himself then Gus supposed he might complain about how easy it was.

The problem came when he was on the bed, waiting. He was, and always had been, a coward. And that stopped him from jumping. I suppose I should inform the readers that Gus's choice to take his own life was a rather poor one. Suicide is not the answer to your problems but Gus can't see any other way out. But that's really what this whole thing was, wasn't it? An enormous, oversized suicide. The death penalty was looming over his head. Why not save them all a step and do it himself?

He stood there until the morning, Gus Hawthing did. He waited. It wasn't until Bill Hobart came to bring him dinner that he acted. Bill tried to stop him (he was a noble man, when it suited him) but as far as Gus Hawthing could see, it was too late. Far too late.  
"Gus no." He feels a sense of loss in his stomach. He had just wanted to see his friend one more time. He smiles. "It doesn't have to be like that." This was when Bill, rather dramatically dropped the tray he was holding and began to frantically undo the lock  
"I've fucked it Bill. Fucked my whole life."

When Gus jumped off the bed, he didn't die right away. A short drop, doesn't break his neck like he would have hoped. God must have hated Gus Hawthing, because wouldn't you know it, in his hurry, Bill Hobart dropped the keys and the delay of him getting them was enough for he ligature to do it's job. He doesn't know what happened next. Perhaps it's better he didn't, anyway.

After Gus jumped, Bill sat on the floor and held him. This was the only time since he was a young boy he was ever held and I think he might have even liked it.

There was no one to clean up his affairs. Bill Hobart took on the task. He sourced money for a proper funeral, and was the only attendee aside from Mattie O'Brian, the grave digger and the priest.  
"Why are you here?" Bill asked, softly.  
"Because I knew him."  
"He killed your friend."  
"I know." She replied. Mattie O'Brian felt a little bit of blame in Gus's death. After all, wouldn't there have been signs? Had she seen them and just ignored them? Did she even see them at all? There was a dead man and she had a dead friend who was already buried at a big funeral with lots of people to boot. It seemed like she should come to this one as well. Not because she liked particularly, no, she'd always found him marginally intolerable. But because she hoped that if she was in his position, someone would notice her.

"Did you know him well?" She asks, after they took their turn with the shovel.  
" I don't think anyone did." Bill replied. And I believe that that sums up the story of Gus Hawthing better then anything I could ever say.


End file.
